Taste for Engineers
Coding used to be the hard part. Now it’s the easy part.
The hard part is knowing what to build.
A friend of mine tells this story about his wife shopping for sarees in Chickpet, Bangalore.
Rows of shops, all selling what looks like the same thing. To him, they’re identical. He always guesses wrong. He thinks price is the signal. It never is. She can tell in seconds which one is worth buying. She’ll pass over fifty without a pause, then stop at one and know.
He’s watched her do this for years. He still can’t see what she sees.
That ability to choose well when everything looks similar is taste.
AI now generates UIs, components, layouts, full applications. The code runs. The designs look fine.
When anyone can build anything, the bottleneck moves from execution to judgment. I’ve started noticing this in my own work. The code isn’t the problem anymore. Knowing what to build is.
Designers have a word for what happens when AI runs without direction: slop.
Same rounded corners. Same gradient buttons. Same hover animations. Stack them together and you get something nobody remembers. Template-looking. Generic.
Slop isn’t ugly. It just doesn’t feel like anyone cared.
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Most people think taste means clean design. White space. Fewer buttons.
Cleartrip is minimal, calm, premium. MakeMyTrip is colorful, dense, offers packed into every pixel. By standard design rules, Cleartrip should win everywhere. It doesn’t. MakeMyTrip dominates in India.
So maybe taste isn’t about clean or busy. Maybe it’s about fit.
Who is this for? What does trust look like to them?
I used to think taste was something you either had or didn’t. But watching people develop it changed my mind.
They usually start by copying. They pick apps they admire and study the spacing, idiosyncrasies, style the texture, typography, the things that got left out. First they go deep on one creator. They assimilate everything that person created until they start seeing the way that person sees.
Two interfaces that do the same thing. One feels better. Why? Do this enough and the patterns reveal themselves.
Pick one designer you respect. Just one. Read everything they’ve written. Not summaries. Not threads. Read until you start predicting their choices before they explain them.
The next time you use AI to build something, pause before you generate. Add a single line about the feeling you’re aiming for. Calm. Fast. Reassuring. Serious. Then let the tool work.
Taste takes years to build. But it starts the moment you refuse to ship the default. The AI purple. The generic hover state. The spacing that feels off but you can’t say why. If you’re spending more time wrestling AI to get the output right than you would’ve spent building it yourself, that friction is your taste. It’s already there. Let it out.
I don’t know what skills will matter in ten years. But I keep coming back to this: building got easy.
Discernment stayed hard.
